Sending your child to right school 'with right classmates' helps results

Getting your child into the right school really does matter, scientists find, but it is just as much about the quality of their classmates as the quality of their teachers.

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent

4:00AM BST 15 May 2009

Researchers discovered that the language skills of youngsters were influenced by their peers as well as by their parents and their tutors. The more articulate the class, the more articulate the individual pupils, they found.

Their findings appear to back up "streaming" in schools and also suggests teachers should encourage children to chat and play so they pick up vocabulary and grammar from each other.

The team said this could explain why education is becoming more polarised, with the good schools getting better and better and the worst schools sinking ever lower.

"There are a lot of studies that show children's language development is affected by the quantity and quality of language they hear from their parents and preschool teachers," said Andrew Mashburn, a senior research scientist at the University of Virginia and the study's lead author.

"Results from this study indicate that language inputs from classmates can stimulate children's language development as well."

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The findings seem to back up British research by the Sutton Trust which suggested bright pupils in comprehensives were being "dragged down by poor classmates".

They will also fuel calls for more setting and streaming in mixed-ability schools and also a more equal distribution of poor-performing pupils to stop them being ghettoised in a small number of schools

The team of American researchers, who published their findings in the journal Child Development, studied more than 1,800 four-year-olds in over 450 nursery schools.

They tested their language skills before entering the schools and then afterwards to see how they had developed. The various assessments included asking pupils to identify objects from a selection of pictures and also asking them to complete sentences.

Scientists found that those with more eloquent and lucid peers improved more than those with lesser language skills. In other words the gap widened between the articulate and the inarticulate classes.

They found that the effect worked for both "receptive language" – the ability to understand - and "expressive language", the ability to speak.

Unlike what was previously thought, the effect was most pronounced on high achievers as they appeared to be able to soak up more of the knowledge of their peers. Lower achievers were more withdrawn and therefore less likely to learn from friends.

The effect of peer to peer learning was about the same as the effect that a child's parent's level of education had on their ability to communicate, they discovered.

It may provide an important early boost to their academic lives, they concluded.

The difference between high achieving and low achieving became larger over time such that the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer", it said.

Researchers said that the research suggested that teachers should concentrate on building a friendly environment that encouraged interaction between pupils.

They should also encourage "dramatic play" – a form of role play and play acting. Pupils reading books together was also important, they said.

"Classmates are an important resource for all children, especially for children who begin preschool with higher language skills," said Mr Mashburn.

"This is likely because these children are better able to capitalise on their peers' skills for learning language. These results also indicate that teachers can promote children's language development by effectively managing children's behaviour, which creates an environment in which children feel comfortable to converse with and learn language from one another."

Robert McCartney, chairman of the National Grammar School Association, said: "There is absolutely no doubt that competition and interaction with peers has an effect on levels of learning.

"All the research shows that in the comprehensive system the brightest pupils are dragged down by their peers but pupils who just scrape into a Grammar are dragged up to the level of the school.